Facebook and PayPal Make Payments Simple

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 at 1:13 am  
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By Ali Ord – Thu, 02/18/2010 –

Advertisers can now use PayPal to make payments on Facebook Ads

Today, Facebook announced their new relationship with PayPal. The new partnership will allow advertisers to make payments through PayPay to Facebook, forming a quick and less difficult process for many businesses, specially helping in areas where payments are more expensive, and for small international companies. Facebook advertisers may find this new system to be a more convenient option when paying for Facebook Ads.

“We want to give the people who use Facebook, as well as advertisers and developers, a fast and trusted way to pay across our service. As our business has grown, offering local methods of payment has become increasingly important for advertisers who want to buy Facebook Ads. Teaming with PayPal, a global leader in online payments, makes this possible,” said Dan Levy, director of payment operations for Facebook.

PayPal could also be a benefit for users that desire Facebook Credits, currently being tested on games and applications, to pay for products on the Facebook Gift Shop and other goods accessible on Facebook. With 400 million people, 70 percent of these in the United States, Facebook has created a community where different payment options are required to make the process simpler for users. PayPal could do just that.

“Put simply, PayPal’s business is payments. We make it easier for customers to send and receive money online in 24 currencies and 190 markets around the world. We’ve always been an important part of the developer ecosystem on Facebook, and we’re excited to expand our relationship directly with Facebook to help grow advertisers’ and developers’ businesses,” said Osama Bedier, PayPal’s vice president of platform and emerging technology.

PayPal will be a manageable way for small businesses to pay for Facebook Ads without payment complications. This new system can only make the process of paying less involved for small businesses.


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The Era Of Social Business

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 at 12:13 am  
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By Jay Baer – Thu, 03/11/2010 -

Today the day we start thinking about social media as part of an integrated program?

My friends at ExactTarget announced a moment ago that they have acquired CoTweet, the leader in enterprise Twitter management, and will be building a social products lab to add tie-ins for Facebook, YouTube, and other elements of the social communication ecosystem.

All members of the CoTweet team, including uber-sharp CEO Jesse Engle will stay on board, and the CoTweet name will continue.

This is the first salvo in what I anticipate will be a flurry of moves to bring together email and social media into a coherent whole. As I wrote just a couple weeks ago, email and social media are more alike than different, and the major corporations that comprise much of the customer bases of ExactTarget and CoTweet are embracing that concept.

Really, what is social media from the brand perspective but email 2.0? A way to remain top-of-mind with your customers, in a way that’s (hopefully) relevant and engaging. Not the ready, fire, aim email that’s the bane of your inbox, but smart, contextual email that sends the right message to the right person at the right time.

That’s been ExactTarget’s territory for a long time, and extending that concept of message-centric, platform-agnostic to social media is a natural fit. And the fact that Forrester Research projects social media spend in the U.S. to be larger than email by 2012 doesn’t hurt, either.

4 Milestones to Social Business

There are numerous granular issues to consider, and it will be fascinating to watch ExactTarget and CoTweet work out the operational details (I might even get to help a little, as ExactTarget is a client), but I see 4 primary hurdles that have prevented the full synergy of social and email to-date. This move will start to eliminate all of these obstacles:

1. Personnel Integration
In many (most?) mid-sized and large companies today, the email group and the social media group are not the same, and communicate infrequently. Having a single platform (the combined ExactTarget/CoTweet) will enable those groups to work together, creating operational efficiencies.

2. Database Integration
While CoTweet has made the most progress toward solving it, the big flaw with customer service and consumer interaction via Twitter (and Facebook to a lesser degree) is a lack of knowledge about the person on the other end of the keyboard. If someone asks a question or complains to @yourbusiness on Twitter, you can possibly provide some immediate triage and basic assistance, but because you don’t know who the person really is, what their account history is, etc. it’s difficult to get into much detail.

And then, if you do solve someone’s problem via Twitter, how do you capture that data? Print out your tweet stream and put it in a file folder?

I suspect ExactTarget’s database capabilities (quite robust due to heavy email customization needs of customers like Microsoft and Home Depot) will be tied to CoTweet and other platforms quickly, enabling companies to use ExactTarget (or its tightly integrated partners, Salesforce or Microsoft CRM) as the customer database of record, with a variety of API-driven messaging options riding on top.

This will provide companies with an holistic view of their customer relationships and each customer’s communication modality preferences. You can look at Jay Baer and determine that he’s a follower of your Twitter account, and has commented on your blog 3 times. But, he’s not a fan of your Facebook page, nor is he a subscriber to your email newsletter. And, you’ll be able to send relevant messages to him accordingly.

3. Messaging Integration
This type of unified understanding of who is connected to your company via what social outposts will usher in a new era of messaging strategy, where companies develop content ladders that dictate how a particular piece of content is modified and syndicated across Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, blogs, brand communities, email, and elsewhere.

This will be a major time saver for brands, as today there is too much reinventing the wheel on the content side, with different people creating disparate messages in each platform. It will also enable companies to move faster, and with more messaging consistency in the event of a social media-fueled crisis.

4. Metrics Integration
Due to its online nature, social media is inherently measurable. Today, however, creating truly meaningful success metrics often requires a custom statistical hodge-podge that tries to tie together data points from across the social spectrum. Try to figure out what your Facebook fan page’s impact is on your number of Twitter followers, for example.

The social media community is starving for a viable way to track customer behavior throughout all social outposts (as evidenced by the massive number of retweets for this post I mentioned recently about a new way to tie Google Analytics to your Facebook fan page).

With ExactTarget and CoTweet working together (not to mention ExactTarget’s built-in ties to Omniture and WebTrends), can the holy grail – an integrated, customer behavior-based, social media metrics dashboard be far behind?

Both Social, and Media

There will probably be social media purists out there wringing their hands raw about this, as a big email company that has <gasp> never exhibited at South by Southwest bought one of the (rightful) darlings of social media. Sure, ExactTarget is a company that’s about messaging – the media side of the social media equation.

But, speaking from firsthand experience, they’re a smart crew that’s not about to turn CoTweet into some sort of spam bot. They bought CoTweet as a first step, not a last step, and as I understand it, are throwing a huge development effort behind it to create major advances in the social/email integration area that go well beyond today’s announcement.

Fundamentally, we’re entering the era of social business, where we have to start treating social media with a level of oversight and accountability. We can’t continue just tweeting randomly and hoping to make “viral videos.” The big companies understand now that all of this needs to be about dollars at some point, and we’ll all be making the social media to social business leap soon enough.

This is a major step in that evolution.



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Advertising on Social Networks: Worth it?

Monday, March 15th, 2010 at 12:36 am  
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By Chris Crum – Wed, 03/10/2010

Can Social Ads Deliver as Well as Search?

Social media is about conversations. That’s the line we’ve been fed time and time again. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s the truth. For marketers and businesses looking to utilize the tools and social networks out there, it will probably serve them well to remember that, but it has often been suggested that directly marketing and trying to sell your product through social networks is in bad taste. That is a topic that probably isn’t so cut and dry.

It’s going to largely depend on not only your goals, but your audience. It’s a different thing altogether when you talk about simply purchasing ads with social networks.

Michael Kahn, SVP, Marketing at Performics says one of the biggest misconceptions people have about social media is that you can’t use it to market or sell.

Facebook has offered advertising for quite some time, and it has over 400 million users. Twitter is expected to launch an ad platform of its own at the upcoming SXSW (from which WebProNews will be providing live coverage), and Twitter has grown greatly over the last couple years.
Can Social Ads Deliver as Well as Search?

Kahn says social is better for selling than many people think. He says Facebook CPC buys can perform really well, at the same ROI as search. Its just that the way Facebook delivers its ads is different than the way Google does. With Google, ads are delivered based on search behavior. With Facebook, ads are delivered based on information that users have chosen to share with Facebook.

Facebook recently began testing a new “promote your post” feature with Facebook Pages. This presents page admins with the option to turn any status update into an ad to run across the social network, as the update is created. If this gets a full roll-out, it could go a long way in boosting advertiser enthusiasm for advertising with Facebook.

We don’t know yet how Twitter’s ads are going to be delivered, but hopefully we will soon. There are other networks that sell advertising on Twitter, however.

Do you advertise on social networks? How is the ROI?

Using Facebook Because That’s Where People Are

Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 2:05 am  
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Consultant Drives 90% of Her Business from Facebook

In my last article, I asked, “Is Facebook as important to your strategy as Google?” Whether your answer    to this is yes or no, there are a variety of reasons why Facebook can be a useful part of your mix. I was looking at an article I wrote about a year ago about driving traffic to your site with Facebook, and I noticed a comment left last month that tells an interesting story.
Allow me to pull an excerpt from the comment. A consultant named Heather O’Sullivan Canney talked about the reasons she created a Facebook page and why it has helped her business:

As a result (IMO) of creating the page with the INTENTION of engaging and not merely as an advertising platform, I now receive nearly 90% of my business via facebook. Even those who I know personally in my local market, and network with on a daily basis, hire me as a result. They often say “I didn’t really think I needed you, but I was sitting there stressing out about my marketing plan and there you were…” (or something along those lines).

I don’t sell internet marketing products Chris, although as my international fan base continues to grow as a result of facebook, I am being asked to create online products.

The key (IMO) is having the intention of building a community, and engaging with them. Nobody wants another place to be advertised to in the ‘in your face’ sense of the word. We want to buy things, and we need to know that they exist, but we want to buy – not ‘be sold to’.

Let’s not get too consumed in the Facebook vs. Google aspect. It is an interesting discussion, but there are no rules (luckily) saying you have to use one and not the other. They are both your friends. And they both provide different ways of getting your business and your message found by potential customers.

As long as I’ve brought it up,however, Facebook does appear to be coming quite the competitor to Google. This week, Nielsen shared some data about time spent online by U.S. Internet users, and the average Facebook user spends about seven hours a month on Facebook. The average Google users spends about two.

It is true that you don’t have to spend much time on Google if it is doing its job right (at least with regards to the search engine), but the fact that  Facebook is where people already are for that amount of time says a lot about its potential. On top of that, Facebook continues to find new ways of keeping users around even more.

Is Facebook a waste of time? It can be, but not to everyone. It’s how you use it. As I mentioned in a comment on the article I linked to above, you can waste a lot of time on Google too. It comes down to personal discipline.

Is Facebook as Important to Your Strategy as Google?

Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 3:48 pm  
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Chris Crum

By Chris Crum – Mon, 02/15/2010 – 3:59pm.

Some Things About Facebook to Consider

According to data from Compete, Facebook has surpassed Google as the top source of traffic for major portals like Yahoo, MSN, and AOL. In December, 15% of traffic to these sites came from Facebook and MySpace. 13% from just Facebook. They say it’s among the top traffic drivers for other types of sites as well.

In a recent WebProNews article, I asked if it is becoming increasingly less critical for businesses to have websites, when they can just have things like Facebook pages and Google Place pages. The discussion is more complex than just that (feel free top participate here), but the general point is that you can have a strong web presence without having an actual web site (although I still recommend having one in most cases).

By Facebook’s most recent stat counts, the site has over 400 million active users. Half of them log on each day. Over 35 million upate their status each day, with over 60 million status updates posted each day. Over 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) are shared each week, over 3.5 million events are created each month, and there are over 3 million active Pages on Facebook.

Over 1.5 million local businesses have active pages. Over 20 million people become fans of Pages each day, and Pages have created over 5.3 billion fans. The average user has 130 friends. These last few stats say a lot about the power of Facebook for businesses.

Facebook pages can be found in Google (often near the top of results pages), and there are things you can do to make them more powerful. I discussed this in more detail here. Basically, it comes down to participation, integration with other online presences, not being annoying to your fans, and hosting events (which can also lead to participation).

Promotion of your page is key as well. Use prominent links on your site(s), use the Facebook Fan Box or something like it. You can promote it in your author bio on articles/blogs, in email newsletters, on other social media profiles, in your Google profile, on your business card, in your signage, in your email signature, and in your ads, to name a few.

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